I might be alone on this one, but I think Capcom has been running low on steam recently. Well, perhaps not totally alone (check out our review of Mega Man X7). Still, there have been some ideas that have been salvageable within their recent games; ideas that just needed better execution. But destroying all faith I’ve ever had in Capcom is Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge. I’ve played through quite a few games in my time that had me questioning the developer’s ability. Never have any of them come close to this game, though, in terms of completely dropping the ball.
First, let me apologize for not describing in detail what all of the terms mean within the game. I do this because, for purposes of this review, there are two types of people in the world. There are the people who have played the Mega Man Battle Network games, and thus know what all of these terms mean. And then there are the people who haven’t, and who would find this game painfully boring. Mind you, the folks who have played the MMBN games will find it even more excruciating (because this distracted the programmers while they could have been making Mega Man Battle Network 4), but I’m going to run on the assumption that the only people foolish enough to get suckered into even thinking about this are folks who played at least one of the previous games.
The game starts with you picking which character you want to guide through the game. You have Lan, Mayl, Dex, and Chaud and their respective Navis all making return appearances, as well as two newbies. You get Kaito, the would-be mechanic and his Navi Turboman, both of whom have a serious case of hero worship for Lan and Megaman. You also get Mary and her Navi Ring, who are easily the most bland characters to ever be playable in a role-playing game of any type. Kaito can get grating, but at least he demonstrates some personality.
Once you choose the character that you want to see suffer through this mess, you get your plot. Sometime after Mega Man Battle Network 2, there is a new NetNavi competition using a new program grid. And, of course, each character has their own reasons for wanting to join this competition. Naturally, there is a sinister plot afoot connected in some sense to the WWW, or World 3, that this tournament is going to reveal. I don’t know what’s worse, to be honest. That Capcom saddled this atrocity with this bad of a plot, or that they just recycled this plot from an earlier Mega Man Battle Network game. Not only did they recycle it, but they recycled it from the third game, which was the most recently released one. Never mind the fact that the plot was actually decently executed in Battle Network 3. When you’re recycling your own plots from scant months ago, you’re just not even trying.
While we're on the topic of not even trying, you wouldn’t believe the actual gameplay in this one. You put your battle chips onto a pyramid grid, which has the pinnacle on the left (always occupied by some Navi chip) and the base on the right. Once you do that, you’re ready for battle. Each round of battle, the game randomly picks a path to follow on the pyramid. Each step that has a battle chip activates that chip, which damages your opponent (and, possibly, his chips). The attacks hit or miss based on some random formula, and then the other Navi gets a turn. This continues until all of the attacks are used, then the next round begins. Should ten rounds of this stupidity pass without producing a winner, remaining health is a tiebreaker. Twice a round, you have a percent chance (determined by how long it was since you last tried) to pull in an emergency “slot in” chip, which is put in as a bonus that round should you succeed.
Did you note the number of times that I said the game randomly does X or Y above, compared to the number of times you actually are active in battle? Once you set up your grid, the most you’ll ever do is tell the game to slot in a chip twice. Well, you do press A to advance the menus, but that was a bit excessive; Capcom could have had everything flow automatically with no input from the player. And, in the end, that’s what this is – you just set up a combination and hope that it results in victory. Your presence as a player is, for the most part, optional in this game.
Even picking up new chips is utterly frustrating. Chips are earned in battle too infrequently, particularly compared to how often you can earn them in the Battle Network games. And you can’t just buy particular chips that you need here; you have to buy randomly and hope for the best. Buying ten random chips at once (at no cost break, mind you) does give a better chance at something good, but I’d rather have the option to spend a bit more and guarantee a chip that I want or can use. Is being able to have a more active hand in how my character develops really that much to ask? According to Capcom, yes it is.
Right now, I’d ordinarily describe the controls, but we are talking about a game in which it is possible to play for over an hour and end up pressing less than 100 buttons. The buttons do exactly what I want them to do when I tell them to do it, which I suppose means the controls are solid. But it turns out the control I’m most interested in is the Off switch. Fortunately, Capcom has yet to figure out how to make that unresponsive. So the one button you’ll want to use most of all while playing this game works just fine. If you should be unfortunate enough to see this game in your Game Boy Advance, I recommend using the Off switch immediately, followed by removal of the game and replacement with something worthwhile.
Praising the graphics is not really something I want to do here. The vast majority of the graphics found in this game are just recycled from the previous three Battle Network games, particularly when an old Navi (like Fireman, who shows up early) appears to fight you. Some new animation exists for the two new main Navis as well as battle animation for the random NPC Navis who actually will fight now. But, as you might expect, there is little new graphically overall in this game. Not much is animated, so you get to see lots of stills and very little actual action. The stills are clean, which is about the best thing you can ever say about this game.
The sound is… well, let’s first establish that we are talking about a Game Boy Advance game. Very few of them are ever solid musically. No Game Boy has ever had good sound, and most programmers get lazy as a consequence when programming the music for these games. The Mega Man Battle Network trilogy (soon to be a quadrilogy) was generally better about that, but as with the graphics, you just get rehashes here. While that is fine with graphics (there, stability is an asset), the sound suffers as a result. If you couldn’t even bother thinking of new tunes to place with the game, maybe you shouldn’t have bothered. The vast majority of the folks (all five of them, and I’d say likely being tortured by some cult members) are playing this without sound anyhow.
You know what irks me most about this? Given the construction and simplicity of the main engine, this is a mini-game. There is less strategy to this one in particular than there is in classics like Triple Triad, Blackjack, or any number of distractions to a main game. But the important thing about those other mini-games was that there was a main game in the same packaging. I would honestly bet that you could have easily slipped this in as a mini-game for Mega Man Battle Network 4 and it would have worked quite nicely. Maybe Capcom could have made their own mini-game package, like Nintendo did with WarioWare. But no, Capcom had to make this a bloated monster that took up its own cartridge and, by extension, way too much space on the shelf.
I guess I just have to say it like this – Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge is easily one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Maybe, stripped down, it could have been an interesting diversion as a mini-game for Mega Man Battle Network 4. But it would require such surgery to make this workable as to render it impossible to recognize. There is so much I could say about this game that decorum prohibits that it’s almost frightening. Sam Kinnison and George Carlin, if they asked me about this game, would be shocked by how much cursing would be involved in my description. My wife asked me to describe this as the best movie to ever appear on the Game Boy Advance, and I would if not for the fact that this cartridge is even miserable at that. I’m just going to finish this review by publicly pleading to Capcom: Please, I beg you, stop forcing your fans to suffer like this. Don’t throw away all the goodwill you’ve built up on games like this. You were once responsible for great games. Please don’t abandon that.
